ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors seen throughout this book how new techniques have led to the discovery of fundamental principles in neurobiology. They discuss in greater detail some of the key techniques that have advanced understanding of the nervous system. A major goal of neurobiology is to understand how the human brain works. Because the human brain is so complex and because our ability to perform well-controlled experiments in humans is limited for ethical reasons, most neuro-biologists use animal models to conduct their research. They discuss selected neurobiology topics from theoretical perspectives, spanning biophysical properties of neurons that lead to action potentials, information transmission mediated by action potential firing patterns, circuit architectures underlying specific computations, and learning algorithms. They has focused on filters that predict a stimulus based on a spike train, but they can use a similar approach to compute filters that predict spike train responses to a stimulus.
